The Year of Cooking Dangerously

How an Amazonian kidnapping, punk rock and an unmatched curiosity for the foods in his native Brazil—poisonous or otherwise—gave chef Alex Atala the tools to run the best restaurant in South America. And now, maybe, the world.

By

Howie Kahn

Updated Feb. 14, 2013 5:09 p.m. ET

ENLARGE

RECIPE FOR SUCCESS | Alex Atala in the back room of his restaurant D.O.M.
Photography by Stefan Ruiz

STRAIGHT OFF A DECEMBER red-eye from the Amazon, Alex Atala is back home, sitting at the buffed ipê wood bar of his São Paulo restaurant D.O.M.—rated the best on the continent and fourth best in the world—talking about the time he was kidnapped.

"In the Amazon," says Atala, who is 44 and freshly sunburned, with tightly cropped gray hair, countless tattoos and a graying red beard that resembles van Gogh's, "this kind of thing can happen." It was 1998, the year before D.O.M.'s inception, and Atala had embarked on a fishing trip in the Amazonian state of Mato Grosso. The first week on the upper Araguaia River passed like an idyll. Butterflies lined the shore; pirarucu, some of the largest freshwater fish in the world swam alongside the boat. A friend was shooting footage for a proposed television program. After several days on the river, and passage into increasingly remote territory, the cameraman asked his native guides what they wanted in return for appearing on tape; they requested, and soon received, a new outboard motor. "The problem," says Atala, "is there's a lot of jealousy between tribes. You buy a beautiful brand-new motor for one, and the others get angry."

When his cameraman was taken into captivity and Atala himself was held at gunpoint by the jealous tribe, a .22 aimed at his heart, he was afraid, but also equipped to handle what came next. Even though he grew up in São Paulo, in the blue-collar district of São Bernardo do Campo, Atala spent a considerable amount of time exploring tucked-away corners of Brazil with his family by car. His mother, Otavia, worked as a dressmaker and his father, Milad, in a factory that made compression stockings. After several neighbors were caught in a fire, Atala's parents combined skills to manufacture dressings for burn victims. "We were unusual," he says. "Everybody else went to the beach, but my father always loved places that were really wild." So, while his cameraman was held hostage, Atala was forced back onto the river to procure a second outboard motor. "I was under huge pressure," he says, his dark eyes narrowing to a wince. "I tried to go as fast as I could. It took a couple days, and I only slept a couple hours. I had to stop because the river was low and impossible to navigate in the darkness with all the sandbanks, all the rocks."

Photos: The Blocks of a Culinary Empire

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Since delivering the motor and freeing his captured companion, Atala has never turned away from the Amazon. His intense lifelong connection to Brazil's massive rainforest—the Amazon is bigger than all of Western Europe—and his ability to navigate its many pitfalls have fundamentally propelled D.O.M.'s success. Having entered the prestigious World's 50 Best Restaurants rankings—sponsored by San Pellegrino and voted on by more than 800 industry insiders—at number 50 in 2006, it has since moved up 46 spots, now trailing only René Redzepi's Noma and two restaurants in Spain. That forward momentum is largely owed to Atala's treating the most biodiverse region in the world as his pantry.

The result is a singular cuisine, one that speaks to both indigenous ways and modern techniques. Dishes at D.O.M. have a way of feeling both out of time and of the moment: contemporary high-end dining with exploitation-free and sustainable Amazonian tribal roots. There are insects on the menu at D.O.M., burnished like jewels. A vibrant yellow sauce called tucupi must be boiled for 20 minutes to eliminate its lingering natural toxicity. One dish features spicy-tart flowers served over ice.

"I feel responsible for helping to show what Brazilian ingredients can do," says Atala. And the way he does it is eye-opening, maybe the last, best gastronomic shock on the planet. "I had never experienced so many of the flavors and ingredients that Alex plays with," says Daniel Humm of New York's esteemed Eleven Madison Park. "It makes for a cuisine unlike anything I've ever seen in my life." Momofuku kingpin David Chang recalls a recent dish of Atala's involving a coconut apple and seaweed. A coconut apple is the spongy mass that grows inside a germinated coconut, and it's not typically consumed; nevertheless, Atala slices it and pairs it with seaweed, giving the dish the flavor, he says, of a beach after a storm—which is exactly what it tastes like. "It was the best first course I've had in years," says Chang. "In a nutshell, it explains the emotion behind Alex's cooking. It's something nobody ever appreciated that he's made brilliant."

WHEN ATALA FIRST bought the building that now houses D.O.M., in 1999, people asked if he had lost his mind. The space, a failed Japanese restaurant with 20-foot ceilings, sat on a poorly lit, dead-end side street. Foot traffic was minimal, and the homeless population was high. Even more audacious than his location was his desire to begin developing a haute cuisine based on Brazilian ingredients that had been previously classified as less sophisticated, less important and less interesting—if they were known at all—than the foods from Italy and France that had dominated diners' interests.

"Until 1990, you could not really import food into Brazil," says Atala. But then import taxes were slashed dramatically. Free trade was introduced under President Fernando Collor de Mello, the first democratically elected head of state after three decades of military rule. Hyperinflation, often marked by four-digit increases, remained a core issue until the finance minister and future president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, introduced The Real Plan in 1994, establishing the real as a stable currency after the prior seven currencies had failed. "The '90s were booming, all about people going crazy for these foreign ingredients," says Atala. "Brazil became addicted to other cuisines."

True to form, Atala went against the grain. He'd always felt like an outsider, growing up not in the center of São Paulo, but on its fringes, with a Palestinian first and last name—he was born Milad Alexandre Mack Atala—owing to his father's Middle Eastern heritage. Risk was in Atala's blood: His maternal great-grand- father was a British expatriate, a gentleman explorer and businessman named Arthur Claude Brizzard Brink, who was murdered in the Amazon, poisoned after challenging the perpetrator of an embezzlement scheme to a duel. Says Chang: "Whenever I see that Dos Equis commercial—the most interesting man in the world—I always think, No, that's not true. The most interesting man in the world is Alex Atala."

Atala's street-punk style emerged in his teens, when he began sporting a foot-high red Mohawk and crude piercings: needles protruding from his neck, cheeks and ears. He was both an amateur welterweight boxer and a DJ at the seminal São Paulo punk club Rose Bom Bom. "Problems, drugs, fights," says Atala, "I looked like a real junkie—stick thin, punk rock style. We didn't have so much heroin in São Paulo. Cocaine, though, a lot. And it was the time when ecstasy first came out, which was strong."

‘"Whenever I see that Dos Equis commerical—the most interesting man in the world—I always think, no, that's not true. The most interesting man in the world is Alex Atala."’

——David Chang

Things calmed down in 1989 when Atala got clean and moved to Europe. But where plenty of ambitious young gastronomes hit the European restaurant trail, apprenticing at Michelin-starred kitchens with the determination of medieval crusaders, Atala simply went overseas to immerse himself in the hard-core music scene he loved. He made money painting houses until he needed a visa to stay on the continent. The easiest route? Admission to a culinary school outside of Brussels. "Later, I tried to get a job cooking in Paris," he says. "I went into Joël Robuchon and they took one look at me, found out I was a Brazilian who had studied in Belgium and walked out of the room."

While cooking in Belgium and France, Atala worked with Bernard Loiseau, an influential French chef in the '90s who is now best known for committing suicide after Figaro newspaper suggested he was about to lose a Michelin star. But Atala always came home to Brazil in the summer. He'd camp, fish, see family and throw big parties with his valuable continental currencies. In 1993, he moved to Milan with his first wife, Cristiana, and found a job at an osteria called Sancho Panza, located behind the Piazzale Loreto. (Atala has an 18-year-old son, Pedro, from his first marriage and 10-year-old twins, Joana and Tomas, with his current wife, Marcia.) "I decided not to work in big restaurants," says Atala. "I worked in small restaurants so I could enjoy my life." Still, Atala nearly quit his job at Sancho Panza. "I was Brazilian," he says. "I wasn't part of their community." Feeling detached and poor, Atala was close to packing it up, but he ultimately stayed, buckled down and got a promotion to sous chef.

"I always wanted to open a bar in Brazil because I loved music," he says. "But the day I got that promotion I realized becoming a chef was my best choice." Around the same time, Atala began seeing the acronym D.O.M. everywhere he looked—on churches and bottles of liquor—finally asking a local priest what it all meant. "He shared this beautiful history," says Atala, an atheist, who learned how Benedictine monks marked their monastery doors with those letters, and how from them, travelers and pilgrims knew they'd found a hospitable place to eat and drink. (D.O.M. stands for Deo Optimo Maximo, Latin for "To God The Good, The Great.")

When Atala returned to Brazil in 1994, he did what he needed to get on his feet. Like everyone else, he cooked foods from other places, beginning his career in São Paulo at a restaurant called Sushi Pasta before moving on to two of the most acclaimed Italian eateries of the time. At the end of 1998, Atala sold his car and opened his own restaurant, Namesa, a casual spot—16 seats around a single table—that quickly became a local sensation for the chef's palpable warmth as well as his duck confit and chicken Milanese. But cooking sure-fire international standards—going with the flow, culinary or otherwise—clashed with the chef's character, and he began to develop his own point of view, his own ideas about cooking, through more frequent trips to the Amazon. "I began talking with the natives," says Atala. "I began visiting and became obsessed with their ingredients."

THE DOORS AT D.O.M. are 14 feet tall, wood and monumental in the way of a Richard Serra sculpture. Directly inside stands a svelte-looking four-seat Amazonian canoe. The room is lined with tall, creamy banquettes, the walls are painted beige, and the chairs all have caned backs, leather seats and slightly bowed wooden arms. A single honey-colored Zingiber flower sits on each table, like a small waxen beehive. As the restaurant begins to fill up for lunch, Atala puts on his glasses and inserts a pair of curved-tip tweezers into the breast pocket of his chef's jacket. He'll use them to garnish his plates with flowers and microgreens too delicate for his thick fingers to touch.

For Atala, maintaining an outsider's sensibility in a Brazilian kitchen meant developing a deep fascination and connection with the interior of his own country. Before going back to work in the kitchen, he shows me a photo of the massive new back tattoo he's been working on since May. Between his shoulder blades, a series of tightly drawn black stripes extend from his tailbone to his neck. Another column of stripes stretches from one deltoid to the other. "This is how natives in Brazil used to paint themselves," he says.

His passion for his homeland has paid off. Lunch and dinner at D.O.M. are booked months in advance. Atala has cooked for three Brazilian presidents (though, as a huge Elvis fan, he gets more excited about having recently cooked for Priscilla Presley, displaying near the back of his dining room the bottle of '96 Château Latour she signed for him: "Maravilhoso Obrigado Priscilla Presley"). And last December, he was invited to help draw the order for the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup, the precursor to next year's World Cup in Brazil, which will, in turn, bring even more curious diners from around the globe to his restaurants. By the 2014 tournament, there will be three: D.O.M; the casual Dalva e Dito, with its accompanying gourmet shop, offering typical varieties of Brazilian cuisine like beans, rice, barbecued meats and farofa (Atala walks the 100 steps between the two restaurants about a dozen times a day); and Riviera, which is Atala's first bar concept, in collaboration with the São Paulo night-life impresario Facundo Guerra.

Atala pushes through his kitchen's double glass doors and takes his place at the head of the line. "Let me show you jambu," he says. "Jambu is very traditional in Amazonas." Tonight he'll use the leaf liberally: around the rim of a bowl of mushroom consommé and atop a fermented manioc flour dish called chibé. Jambu functions on three levels: It numbs the lips and tongue, generates a surprising amount of saliva in the back of the mouth and works as what feels like a consciousness-expanding drug for vegetables, fats and proteins. Adding jambu makes everything taste bigger. "The first time I tried it, it was awful," says Atala. "But it becomes an addiction."

Atala then proudly presents a couple inches of a gnarled root that looks better suited for weaving rope than it does for kitchen use: priprioca, a relative of wetland plants like papyrus and rush, which he incorporates as an aromatic in desserts. This makes sense, considering that the plant, until he got a hold of it, was used exclusively to scent makeups and perfumes. It took Atala three years of research and development, with the help of chemists, to get it on the menu. His interest in it, he writes in a recent issue of The International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, began as a matter of indignation, stemming from, he says, "the fact that the cosmetic and pharmacy industries know better and dedicate themselves more to the products from the rainforest than gastronomy does. In the past, these kinds of companies spoiled the area considerably. Although they are trying to improve their relationship with this region, the situation is far from successful." To Atala, then, priprioca is both a way to enhance his lemon and banana ravioli—three translucent citrus discs pocketing thin slices of banana de oro, each the size of a dime—and, also, an emblem of the fact that D.O.M. exists in a perpetual discovery phase, where outcomes must track in terms of both plating and sustainability.

"The logic toward the rainforest in Brazil used to be that you could only profit from it if you destroyed it," says Roberto Smeraldi, director of the environmental protection group Amigos da Terra for the past two decades, a coauthor of federal environmental legislation and a member of the board of ATÁ ("fire" in Tupi), a new institute and think tank founded by Atala last June to address food-related practices in the Amazon. "But now," he continues, "people have started to see the forest as an asset, so in order to use it, we must conserve it." Smeraldi counts Atala as an emerging voice in the conservation movement.

"Alex had reached a moment of his career," says Smeraldi, "when he realized his professional success would need to be used in service of a larger cause." Smeraldi sees new endeavors in food production as perhaps one of the best ways to introduce sustainable management techniques to the Amazon, and he sees Atala as an important pioneer for new development. Atala sees it all as a logical carryover from his punk days. "Back then I was always against something," he says, tweezing tiny tropical flowers onto a warm white plate. "Now I use that same energy to fight for something. My main idea is to show local people how important these ingredients can be for them." It's an idea that extends beyond the Amazon. "Go see my rice producer," Atala tells me, getting choked up. "You'll see what I mean."

José Francisco Ruzene is a barrel-chested, third-generation rice farmer from the town of Pindamonhangaba in São Paulo state, about a two- hour drive northeast from D.O.M. He's wearing a straw hat to keep the strong summer sun off his face, as he proudly shows off his new 600-square-meter processing facility. A few years ago, Ruzene showed up at D.O.M. and felt so impoverished and ashamed that he didn't want to walk through the door. But Atala took to his product, a specialty black rice, and ever since, the Ruzenes have experienced a kind of Alex Atala bailout plan. Now, their rice is served in restaurants and sold in stores. The box of their small-grain rice bears a photo of Ruzene, his wife and Atala clustered like a family. Business has spiked by 500 percent, and the Ruzenes have been able to pay off decades' worth of debt while dedicating their time to developing additional specialty strains of rice. "Alex changed my life," says Ruzene, adjusting his hat. "He talks and other chefs listen. Everyone who eats wants what he has."

IT'S NEARLY MIDNIGHT and D.O.M. is bustling, tables still turning over, diners just starting their eight-course tasting menus. Atala is rotating between my table, the kitchen and a four top where ATÁ board members Smeraldi and the Brazilian branding heavyweight Ricardo Guimarães are meeting with executives from Banco do Brasil. One of the executives is the vice president of agribusiness and a former senator. ("He still has the president's ear," Atala tells me later. "That was a very important meeting for our institute.") They're all discussing financing for artisanal and native food producers and throwing support behind farmers with sustainable practices rather than the big agricultural conglomerates responsible for a large share of the Amazon's deforestation.

Food flows from the kitchen. Next up: Ants, two of them, sitting on a cube of cold pineapple. They taste not like lemongrass, exactly, but like a field of lemongrass all concentrated into one small insect. When Atala first found them in the far northwestern city of São Gabriel da Cachoeria, while doing research for D.O.M., he asked what they'd been seasoned with. Because the flavor struck him as profound, he was astonished to hear the answer: "They are just ants."

Around 2 a.m., Atala is preparing to go home, but not before he takes the Banco do Brasil guys into the kitchen for photographs (everyone who comes to D.O.M. asks for photographs), posing with the former senator and his associate in front of a framed native headdress. After he steps back through the glass doors and says his goodbyes, he thumbs a cigarette and shows me another tattoo. Inked across the crook of his right arm, he says, is his story, a crude comic strip that boils it all down to a simple linear equation: There's a sad face with Mohawk leading to a plus sign leading to a boiling pot. Then, there's an equal sign and happy face wearing a toque. "I've had two lives," says Atala. "I was a punk who became a happy chef."

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